Negrek

Ten Years of Salvage

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 02:44:39 GMT

Way back on November 1st. 2012, I started posting my third novel-length fanfic to FFN. Ten years later, a lot has changed, but I in fact still posting that same novel-length fanfic to FFN! It's been quite a ride, so I figured I'd take this opportunity to indulge in a bit of reflection.

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Salvage Chapter 51 Commentary

Sun, 16 Oct 2022 15:01:23 GMT

Been a while since I've gotten a commentary post together. Figured I might as well take a few minutes to reflect on Chapter 51, since I think it exemplifies a lot of the qualities present in this current run of chapters--roughly 49-53.

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Salvage Musings

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 03:47:58 GMT

I've been making great progress on Salvage lately, especially in terms of plotting my way forward through the next arc of the story. This part of the fic is a bit "squishy"--there are multiple plot threads running simultaneously, and while they influence each other there's less of a strong sense of cause and effect between them, so it can be hard for me to order my scenes. But! Recently I was actually able to sit down and lay out the next ten chapters or so in a pretty satisfactory way.

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NanoWriMo 2020/2021 Retrospective

Sun, 12 Dec 2021 16:40:30 GMT

Doing a retrospective for NaNo 2020 and NaNo 2021 this year. I intended to do one last year, but then ended up... not, lol. I had to go through my NaNo 2020 output in order to work on NaNo this year, so it's fresh in my mind once again.

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"The Sun's Chosen" Commentary, Part 2

Sat, 16 Oct 2021 07:36:54 GMT

With my first drafts, the goal is to simply to get all the words in the story out on the page somewhere, without regard for order or logical progression. The goal of the second draft is to get everything in the correct order, remove anything extraneous, and generally finalize the structure of the narrative. The primary the task here would be to take the "second beginning" of the story, which accounted for the things I'd added as I was writing my way through the first draft, and glue it onto the top of the story where it belonged. But I'd want to keep whatever pieces I really liked out of the original opening, too! Because I often write out of order and it's not uncommon for me to have multiple versions of the same scene--whether because I wanted to try different things or simply because I enjoyed it a lot and wanted to write it a second or third time for fun--having to do this sort of merge operation is extremely common for me in editing. I hate it!

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"The Sun's Chosen" Commentary, Part 1

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 04:42:33 GMT

I participated in the second annual Zoroark Games this year, and I thought it would be fun to talk a bit about how I approached my imitation entry this year. I meant to do this for my imitation last year as well, but didn't manage to pull it together (or even a properly completed version of the fic, lol)--perhaps someday. For now, anyway, I'm going to post the various drafts of this story and talk a bit about why I made the choices I did--what I was trying to do in order to make my story feel like a kyeugh fic.

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Glitches Referenced in "Being Human"

Sat, 02 Oct 2021 20:50:48 GMT

I wrote a one-shot for this year's Zoroark Games that was all about glitches! I thought it would be fun to lay out the glitches being referenced there, but as there are so many I figured it would be distracting to have all of them actually in the AO3 document itself/have footnote references every few words. Instead, I'm posting here and linking in the story's notes. :)

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Salvage Chapter 48 Commentary

Sat, 07 Aug 2021 15:26:38 GMT

After some chapters of nothing much happening, suddenly everything happens in this chapter! What is a pacing and can you eat it.

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Salvage Chapter 47 Commentary

Sun, 20 Jun 2021 08:40:13 GMT

And so we come to Chapter 47, the first of the "reboot" chapters, as it were.

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Salvage Chapter 46 Commentary

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 20:23:24 GMT

Hrrrk, this chapter.

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Salvage Chapter 45 Commentary

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 05:56:00 GMT

It's finally done! This is a big chapter, both in terms of wordcount and in terms of story significance, but I think it reads pretty breezily despite the length. I hope you find the same!

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Salvage Chapter 44 Commentary

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 08:18:38 GMT

I thought it would be fun to talk a little bit about the latest chapter of Salvage (right here!), and hopefully future chapters as well! Knowing me this'll be the only one that gets done, but hey, at least it'll be one! There's nothing particularly spoiler-y in this chapter that will be revealed as such, but if you're interested, it's probably better to read the chapter before reading this.

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Pandemic Adventures

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 01:06:53 GMT

Last Week: ordered four avocados, received zero avocados
This Week: ordered four avocados, received sixteen avocados

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NaNoWriMon 2020

Tue, 03 Nov 2020 06:34:17 GMT

I took a break with NaNoWriMon in 2019, since NaNo revealed their updated website (and lack of wordcount API) late enough in the game that it would have been pretty tight for me to update my code in time for the November challenge. I'd also hoped (but didn't feel super optimistic that) they would reinstate the API in time for the 2020 event, so there'd be some documentation available for it and some kind of official blessing indicating it was okay to build on. No such luck! Some kind soul did write a small library for connecting to the API, and one of the NaNo tech staff (I think?) did give a person their blessing to build an application that would use it, but it's still very much on the down-low. And I'm keeping the NaNoWriMon on the down-low as well, not doing much promotion of them; hoping that keeping it to dozens of them this year, rather than the usual hundreds, might make anybody watching the API traffic a little less grumpy and inclined to cut me off. There are well over 11,000 NaNoWriMon that have been created to date, which is completely wild!

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Mon, 12 Oct 2020 03:26:47 GMT

Those times when you discover you hardcoded your username and password into a file back in like 2012. :X

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Salvage Chapter 44 Deleted Scene

Fri, 18 Sep 2020 00:48:13 GMT

Currently working on the monster amalgam of Chapter 44 and 45. This scene here already got kicked out of Chapter 43 and doesn't really seem to have a home in these chapters, either, so out it goes. I've got to get this beast under 20k words somehow!

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Hello, Dreamwidth!

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 08:55:26 GMT

And also Hello, Tumblr, since I've set things up to crosspost from one to the other. Ideally not twice, which is what happened with the test post, but sorting that out will be a problem for tomorrow if it happens again.

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